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Believe it or not: Evil and acts of evil exist

You know the old saying that the greatest trick that the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist? Evil does exist and one of the most damaging things we’ve done in our society is pretending that evil and acts of evil don’t.

Another damaging thing we’ve done is to pretend that everyone has some evil in them. But that’s not the case.

Dylan Roof, who murdered nine African Americans in a church, recently wrote that he wants to make something clear. He does not regret what he did and he has not shed a tear for the people who he killed. There is evil right there. And most of us look aghast at these type of events.

But do you sense the “racial hatred doorway” that has been opened as a nation? Evil exists, and acts of evil happen, but we’ve been taught that they don’t.

Who has opened this doorway? A lot of new polls say that people think race relations have gotten far, far worse.

Look at the case of the four young African Americans who kidnapped and tortured a mentally handicapped young man. Dylan Roof and the four in Chicago are comparable. They both involve racial hatred.

Negative politicking is one cause. Somewhere way back in the invention of politics, there were negative ads. And they’ve been going on forever. There was fake news in the founders’ times as well. Wedge issues have caused racial hatred, too.

We’ve also had a community agitator in chief. Now, I know Obama didn’t have anything to do with what happened in Chicago but it’s a byproduct of micro-targeting and deriding “whiteness.” This creates an opening for racial hatred.

There were actually teams of people on CNN trying to say that what happened in Chicago wasn’t motivated by hatred — this could have been a prank gone bad; this might have been something inspired by Trump. That is the kind of thing that opens the door.